Modeling
by Storiot
Summary: "The gray afternoon light filled the apartment complex, a set of four low buildings centered around a square of yellowing grass with a rusted barbecue grill and a small gazebo sprayed with graffiti in a dozen faded colors of paint that glistened on the damp wood in the drifts of rain carried along in the breeze that came down across the balconies..." Bella/Laurent. Hurt/Comfort.


"Modeling"

The gray afternoon light filled the apartment complex, a set of four low buildings centered around a square of yellowing grass with a rusted barbecue grill and a small gazebo sprayed with graffiti in a dozen faded colors of paint that glistened on the damp wood in the drifts of rain carried along in the breeze that came down across the balconies and their brightly-colored plastic tricycles and American flag folding chairs and through the twinkling droplets hung on the long needles of the shadow-filled pine trees at each corner of this communal lawn where Laurent Da Revin stood leaning on the long-disused grill beneath his umbrella, eyes closed, breathing in the rainy air, slowly exhaling as the chill that pierced his raincoat and the sound of the scattering rain sent a shiver through his body and a vague memory of youth through his mind, of watching the rain fall, early in the morning, from the window of the hospital room to which, the day before, a minder from the orphanage had brought him for surgery to remove the child who had become fused to his shoulder by a rare process known as postnatal conjunction wherein two children, due to the pliability of the human body before the age of three, become physically joined in a collision or by careless parents who leave their infants lying side-by-side for too long a time, as, famously, happened to the so-called "Siamese Twins" Chang and Eng, two unrelated babies who, immediately after sloughing forth onto the birthing deck of one of Siam's famous hospital boats, wrapped together by a midwife in the same blanket to keep them warm during the monsoon that had begun a few hours earlier, became attached as they floated down the canals or "khlongs" of their home province of Samut Songkhram, past the ancient gardens, the leaves almost black with age rustling overhead, past the temples and fishing villages, down the pungent waters where Chang and Eng would, years later, swim each day, in search of clams and crayfish to feed their families, Chang swimming along with his head above water to breath for the pair while Eng, submerged, dug through the mud for hours, enjoying the silence of the canal floor, away from his loud and cruel "brother" who, after they immigrated to the United States as part of a traveling freak show in 1829, would with his violent treatment of his slaves often drive the delicate and kind Eng, a fervent abolitionist, to tears, though Eng, despite his differences with Chang, refused the operation to separate them after the latter's death in 1874, and was buried alive three days later, after an elegant funeral which drew celebrities and politicians from all over the world to their plantation in North Carolina where President Ulysses Grant and Sarah Bernhardt shared lewd jokes in French over the open casket in which Eng, scandalized, pretended not to understand the language and stared at the ceiling until Chang's wife Adelaide started a fistfight with Frederick Douglass's wife Anna, sparking an enormous brawl between Chang's mourners, all of whom remained loyal to the cause of the Confederacy, and Eng's mourners, who consisted mainly of abolitionists and radical free-thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, which continued well into the afternoon, drawing crowds of amused onlookers from the slum of crude shacks that had sprung up on the plantation's northern border where Chang's former slaves had settled after the emancipation to wait out the chaos of the postwar years and attempt to eke out a few crops from the stinking and sucking mud under the direction of their unofficial mayor, an old man named Natalio Da Revin who had bought his freedom in his youth and had, finding few opportunities in the United States, and even fewer in Liberia, to which he had stowed away after reading a pamphlet from the American Colonization Society, by 1830 made his way to Merthyr Tydfil in Wales and passed the next year laboring at the vast furnaces of the Llecheu Brycheiniog ironworks making locomotives before rumors that he had brought to Merthyr Tydfil a "sinister voo-doo religious practice" (which historians later noted had, judging by certain court records, an odd resemblance to the teachings of the Kama Sutra, which at that time had been translated into neither English or Welsh, and almost certainly could not have been known to the accused, nor his accusers, though, judging by diaries kept by town officials of the time, the practice may have resembled more closely that private act scientists now term _intracourse_ and the layman terms _pouring the palm-wine _or _dancing with the five-fingered temptress_, likely making this man one of the first practitioners, if not the inventor of that act, which when word of it began to spread understandably terrified the government and clergy who recognized that, if intracourse became a common practice, few if any men and women would bother with traditional _intercourse_, depleting Britain's population, and eventually leading to the total extinction of all human life, an outcome later found to be somewhat unlikely) forced him to flee back to the United States with his son, a minor acrobat with a vulgar sense of humor named Apollo who, after making enemies of every trapeze parlor owner in North America with his harshly political high-wire satires in which he impregnated a number of so-called "high-wire harlots" who scaled ladders or slipped past the guards to race haltingly down the line and pay their respects to their hero (to the appreciative applause and catcalls of those below), spent several years as the "gentleman benefactor" of a particularly notorious Miss America of the 1930s said by the gossip papers of the time to bathe in "her own yoghurt" as a preservative against the harsh sunlight of the racetracks where she flinched from the stamping forelegs of the horses as she recited whatever nonsense she'd been told to say to the ragged old men in the bleachers sneering at her and at Apollo (who they fortunately assumed to be her servant) while spitting, muttering to themselves, rubbing their lucky bracelets, amulets, rabbits' feet, snow globes, their own flaccid faces, or gazing out past the track and the over the fences to the bright glimpse of ocean where plumes of dead seaweed hung from the rocks like the bolo ties of the thin-armed youths who stood stripping off their leather vests down by the frothy brown water, among the shattered remains of concession stands poking up from the mud alongside incrustations of industrial waste so acrid that this nauseated Miss America would turn to the former acrobat after her speech and beg him to take her away, back to their waiting automobile, back down the highway, through the clouds of dust and horseflies over roadkill, beneath the long wires across the gray sky, past burnt-out shacks, black cars on the gray roads, and the dead black trees marking dried-up creeks, toward the city on the horizon where a doctor would reveal her recent swelling of the abdomen to be a symptom of the pregnancy that would kill her in the middle of childbirth on June 20, 1939, and leave Apollo to raise the sickly infant himself in a dilapidated Los Angeles shack while telling lewd jokes to his Okie neighbors and hissing at the heat until his own death two years later would end his unsuccessful lawsuit to claim the money the Miss America had one night on their goodwill tour through France and northern Italy promised to him in her will (against the vehemently-stated wishes of her parents) and his ability to care for the child, little Laurent Da Revin, now an orphan, who was placed in the infamous Southern California Asylum for Bastard Negroes and Mulattoes, and on arriving was immediately put to work digging graves for the half-dozen of his fellow inmates who had died earlier that day in a particularly brutal fight with boys from the neighboring Los Angeles Academy for Quadroons and Octoroons when, after the latter institution was shut down following the state's discovery of the widespread abuse occurring there, its inmates were, despite the intense rivalry between the two institutions, shipped to the Asylum, which itself was shut down soon after Laurent "graduated" on his sixteenth birthday and moved into a one-room apartment fashioned from a closet in the neighborhood of Watts with two members of an outlaw "marihuana gang" and an elderly prostitute, sleeping in six-hour shifts then, at the sound of the next roommate forcing the door open, vacating this apartment, this foul cell, barely large enough to accommodate the thin, soiled mattress on the floor, this hole, infested with vermin, rattling with the thunder of beaten wives and wine bottles being thrown against shared walls at all hours, its utter darkness at night (as only the prostitute could afford a lamp, and she took it with her after her shifts in the room) a hindrance to Laurent's attempts to teach himself to read, its stench permeating his body, following him in the morning as he went down to the communal shower on the lower floor of the dusty old apartment building, which, forty years later, against protests by conservation groups that it was a historical landmark, was torn down and replaced with a strip mall that housed a beauty salon, an unsanitary hamburger restaurant, and the "erotic piñata" shop that popularized those full-sized effigies of naked women commonly found hanging with their strings around their necks in the style of a noose at bachelor parties and men's rights conferences, crudely-drawn mouths wide open in an ambiguous expression of emotion, and, to rain down on the hooting crowds below once the blindfolded man finally cracked the piñata open with a lucky swing of his traditional wooden stick, packed full of prophylactic paraphernalia, lewd magazines, and VHS tapes of movies like _Interracial Violation 2_, starring Laurent Da Revin himself (appropriately, grandson of the supposed inventor of intracourse), whose struggles to find employment in the 1960s had led him to "act" under the direction of such directors as Lasse Braun and the Mitchell brothers in a series of rather demeaning films from 1968 to 1995, all of which seemed to him very silly whenever he thought of them, as he did now, the rain against his umbrella reminding him of the unusually dismal weather that day four years earlier when he was informed that he was too old for this work, for titillating beady-eyed old white men with images of blonde girls in absurd entanglements with him, of white women in housewife costume cowering in brightly-lit fake kitchens and waving butter knives at him with a warning that their husbands would be home soon and would kill Laurent if he dared to so much as take one step closer, would put a shotgun in his face and pull the trigger, would string him up in the front yard as a warning to all the other thugs, the crackheads, the animals, before the sight of Laurent so overwhelmed these women that they threw down their weapons, threw off their clothes, and submitted to his attentions, soundtracked by music that grew increasingly dull over the decades, from relatively sophisticated jazz in the late sixties to inane, synthesized muzak in the nineties, when the directors grew bored of him and younger, more physically imposing actors, more threatening (and therefore appealing) to the Southern market, began to take roles that he would have won easily earlier in his career, forcing him to scramble for a new job that would pay the rent, to apply for jobs like janitor and dishwasher that he invariably failed to get, due to his unwholesome résumé, his decades in a business that the Human Resources stooges secretly patronized but outwardly rejected as filth, loathsome trash, barbarism, if questioned on the matter by their wives or coworkers or fellow churchgoers, echoing the standard denunciations of pornography that that had been formulated by such activist groups as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in the nineteenth century, when lewd photographs and the first pornographic films began to circulate, inspiring busybodies of the time to band together to enforce "purity" in the arts and a suppression of indecency wherever it may be found, whether that meant smashing cameras, burning easels and canvasses, destroying saloons, raiding brothels and dragging the inmates and occasionally customers into the streets for a vigorous whipping as a loud-voiced man read from the Holy Bible, or even attacking with chisels and hammers that newfangled scourge of cities all across the continent, a peculiar invention commonly known then as Mr. Side's Folly, a pavement of concrete laid alongside city streets by one Alexander Side to facilitate the movements of pedestrians beside lanes increasingly dominated by automobiles, and drew, according to the literature of these purity societies, not only the businessmen rushing to work and maids carrying home the day's shopping necessary for the proper functioning of any city, but also less-savory elements, including prostitutes, known, one pamphlet reported, to "perform what is named by those sadly acquainted with it 'Mr. Side's Walk', a vile, irregular perambulation upon these narrow paths which, unlike the narrow way commanded to us by that great savior of mankind who died to wash away our sins, lead only to utter degradation and doom, tempting the pilots of passing horseless carriages to pause in their reckless motorized careenings and invite one of these women of abandoned chastity or daughters of forgotten modesty to step aboard their terrifying iron chariots and race forth with them at deadly speeds of more than five miles per each hour to a secluded glen or meadow where pyramidical Asiatics perform unholy ceremonies in some grotesque Eastern tongue, where hulking Nubians dance to the hideous sound of drums and 'guitars' (a foreign, stringed instrument eternally unplucked by Christian fingers), where an indescribable fetor inspires revolt amongst delicate stomachs, where swart Fejees pose sultanically upon hempen cushions and trade uncounted fistfuls of gold coins for the low favors of parlormaids in trowsers (sic) and blouses, where loose bachelor girls known for their skill in the French art of _natation_ are saddled with a kind of howdah peculiar to these orgies and raced down a nearby river or across a lake in a regatta by trained monkey jockeys holding miniature riding crops to urge their mounts to swim ever more quickly to the finishing-line and which raise painful lacerations upon the skin of these bachelor girls in the monkeys' mindless lust for victory and the promise of a banana or cocoa-nut should they grasp the advantage over their fellows in their tiny paws, and men with the unmistakable lumpish brow, crooked jaw, sumpterly gait, and idiotic speech of a Slovak appeal to the wickedness of their foul antemosaic gods with mumbled prayers in the consuming darkness of twilight, all under the direction of a Lord Warden of the festivities charged with the responsibility of maintaining the general chaos and ensuring that the fallen women brought here in a state of hurry by horseless carriage are defiled by all present, cheering and praising with limitless boister the name of Alexander Side for his perverse invention that has already brought a tripling of prostitution upon every city of the United States in the decade since its popular introduction, and even driven the inventor himself into a profound insanity, as, ever since a duo of Scotchmen drunkenly operating their automated vehicle one forenoon mistook Mr. Side's Folly for a road fit for their clattering machine and stove in Mr. Side's skull in a collision as he treaded his invention for himself, this dubious man of science has been confined to an asylum in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland under the care of top European alienists, who, in one of their reports to the _New York Times _have written that 'Mr. Side has complained for three months now of a gentleman visible only to his own eyes, a figure exactly resembling his own person in every respect, wearing the same clothes (whatever he may that day be wearing), treading the gardens of this sanatorium beneath Mr. Side's windows, bowing to passing doctors and nurses (unacknowledged, of course), a nemesis bent on the usurpation of Mr. Side's rightful place in the general society of mankind and, to that end, having evidently devised a cunning scheme of impersonation, and free of any contrary scruple, highly successful in the commission of acts that bring ridicule and the appearance of madness upon the reputation of our patient, such as overturning the furniture of his cell, acting the Lothario with maiden nurses and groundskeepers' daughters, eviscerating one of the house's guard dogs and supping of the mortal blood that came forth, and inflicting painful japeries upon the dignity of numerous alienists by means of _bobo traps_ placed over doorways and coiled-spring imitation "serpents" that leap out to terrify the unlucky researcher during the daily examinations of Mr. Side's posterior orifice to check for the contraband blue prints for new inventions drawn on spare scraps of paper he has taken to hiding there against the expressed orders of his physicians, who, fearing that the design of further inventions would only increase the seriousness of Mr. Side's insanity, have forbidden him continuing to devise his new wonders while restrained under their scrutiny, so imbalancing to his mental fluids does the act of invention seem, as illustrated by his bizarre fixation on one of his fellow men of science, a rail-road conductor on the Atlantic City to Camden line, and named, if Mr. Side's febrile rants can be at all taken for the true, Alexander Boardman (another mysterious double?), who has improbably crafted a device not dissimilar to Mr. Side's Folly (which he himself calls his Permanent Human Locomotion Paved Foot-Highway), a device this Mr. Boardman, should he exist outside Mr. Side's imagination, pithily calls a Boardman's Walkway, and has equipped with an ingenious machine somehow involving magnets, pulleys, levers, and electrified wires to detect and repel any lady of ill-cast virtue, woman of popular favor, candid girl, nice girl, fornicatrix, and prostitutes of at least one dozen other forms potentially treading upon the Boardman's Walkway (Mr. Side's Folly has no more than a series of shallow grooves cut at five-foot intervals across the concrete, which supposedly will serve to trip up the feet of prostitutes, as they are known to walk with a distinct, shuffling gait that his studies have found is vulnerable, he claims, to the interruptions of these normally harmless grooves and that likely derives from the varied infections of their unspoken latitudes that make a normal stride painful and are a natural consequence of their sin), which, our patient fears, has made this new pathway by far the preferred to his own amongst the city fathers across this country now deciding between the two inventions in hopes of modernizing the to-ing and fro-ing of their ambulatory citizenry and greatly fearful of importing any new invention that might inspire social mischief, such as bloomers and the velocipede', both of which have become inextricably chained to the popular image of the 'urban scourge', known as prostitutes, those heathenish daughters of Heliogabalus, who are rightly reviled by all", and infamous for appearing in the first examples of what were then known as "gentlemen's photogrammaticals", blurry photographs of women in a state of undress for the amusement of an audience that had until the invention of photography resigned themselves to classical paintings of voluptuous Greeks in a state of undress with thighs that bulged landscapishly and dimpled under the feet of tiny cherubs, such as the large portrait, which at a "starving artist" sale would be termed _sofa-sized_, reflecting its purpose as furniture rather than art, hanging in the bar Laurent frequented in the 1960s, where, in August of 1965, he found himself trapped for several hours by a mob outside which, as part of the larger riots engulfing the neighborhood, was attempting to set fire to the establishment, known to be owned by a Jew, who, as they waited for the police alone together (the other patrons had known enough to stay out of the bar that day), showed Laurent a bag of acrid green herbs imported from the Isle of Minimus, the very same "_tabac de la plage_" cultivated around the many beach houses that dot the coast of the Isle and processed through enormous charcoal filters at inland factories into their famous Minimal wine, a harsh blue wine even more difficult to find in the United States than the herb itself, one of the first drugs to be outlawed in that country, though the bar's owner had been able to smuggle some back after visiting the Isle, and decided, since it seemed that they were both about to die, to share some with Laurent, warning him first that its effects were much stronger than he might expect, that it was valued primarily for its effect of influencing the part of the brain (the temporo-parietal junction) that regulated the distinction between the internal monologue and the speech of others outside oneself, creating the sense that imagined interlocutors were present, and that their speech originated from outside the user's own mind (as evidenced by its habitual users often seen talking to themselves, giving them, on the Isle, the nickname _les soi-mêmes_, which the English later corrupted to _swamis_), which, though this sounded slightly fantastical to Laurent, was confirmed by one of the other patrons crowding the room who, when Laurent admitted some skepticism regarding the herb, shook her head fondly and pointed out to him, gently resting her head against his shoulder, that he was alone with the old Jew behind the bar, clearing his head enough that he, for several minutes, returned to reality and asked the other man to help him get more of this substance, which supposedly could be imported through certain dwarf immigrants in Watts and the surrounding neighborhoods from which, however, for the moment, they had mostly fled, seeking to avoid the riots which, along with the other race riots engulfing the United States in the 1960s (riots that would be mysteriously forgotten and downplayed in history books almost immediately in favor of sentimental celebrations of nonviolent figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Junior), would convince politicians like Lyndon Baines Johnson to promote racial equality in the laws of that country, but which, in the paranoid opinion of Los Angeles's dwarf community, seemed, at the time, likely to develop into a pogrom, leaving only one dwarf nearby to sell Laurent the herb, which even in 1999 he continued to smoke regularly, and held in his inner coat pocket to smoke later as he drove in his Honda to the apartment complex at the address given to him, as he crossed from the part of town where people ride bicycles for fun and exercise to the part of town where people ride bicycles because they can't afford cars, then, after following a major street through downtown and toward the outer edge of the city, reached a vast confusion of suburban apartment buildings and the haphazardly landscaped entrances to new housing developments with grown men in cargo shorts walking dogs and teenagers staring and laughing with a sinister gleam in their eyes behind the windshields of their expensive cars starting impatiently forward against the red traffic lights when he rolled past to the apartment complex, the four dull little buildings that seemed to sag in the thickening mist which fell with increasing urgency as the afternoon progressed, tapping on his umbrella, sneaking in around his raincoat to gradually soak his clothes, drowning out or mixing with the rushing roar of the interstate highways somewhere past the nicer apartment complexes towering above this older, shabbier set of apartments that looked like it had probably once been a motel, back before the new forms of pornography were introduced in the early nineties by a local film studio based in a formerly abandoned amusement park down the road and sparked a rush to find new housing for the thousands of inhabitants who raced in to work for this company which had, after he had foolishly blurted it out during one film session for _My Inner Goddess 2:_ _Ebony Intruders_, stolen and patented Laurent's idea for pornography that would assist its audience in physical functions other than those normally stimulated by this art form, based on his theory that, since the image of copulation inspires the audience to physically react in sympathy with the performers on screen, so too would images of any other physical act, curing constipation, for example, with films of people defecating, curing overeating with films of people politely refusing food, making people hungrier with films of people guzzling down food (to be projected on the walls of grocery stores and restaurants), and so on, though Laurent had felt little confidence in his idea and felt no anger about its theft until this series of "pornogogical" VHS tapes began to sell by the millions and the company, with whom Laurent had done most of his work ever since moving to the Midwest in the late 1980s, finally able to cast off the dead weight of its embarrassingly unprofitable modeling agency "front" (which protected its operations from the regressive laws of this Midwestern state), completely abandoned conventional pornography for this new scheme, firing Laurent in the middle of a scene with the "mature" actress Bella Swan, better known as Foxxxy BlonDD, the only person in the world Laurent considered a friend, the only one who wouldn't cringe and look away when he asked if anyone wanted to go have brunch after a long night of filming, the only one who seemed to understand him, until she starved herself to death in 1994, having been told that she had aged out of the "mature" roles and into the "grandma" roles, which relatively few studios were casting in the mid-nineties, and left Laurent without anyone to talk to at all, despite his attempts to talk to the other workers at the Post Office job he got after he himself was deemed by his former employers' only local competition to be too old for the movies and wearily applied for dozens of menial jobs around town, filled out their humiliating questionnaires that asked things like "true or false: it's OK to steal from my workplace as long as I don't get caught" and "true or false: everybody uses illegal drugs at work now and then", got turned down again and again, and, to his surprise, finally got the job at the Post Office, a permanent temporary job, working with a team of college kids and haggard old women who received the letters to "Santa Claus" sent by the hundreds of thousands each winter, skimmed their contents, and either sent back semi-personalized postcards wishing the letter-writers a merry Christmas, should the letters contain the usual petulant demands for toys or fatuous demands for world peace, or transferred the letters to Laurent, who alone at the enormous warehouse converted for this effort was responsible for analyzing the letters carefully and alerting the proper authorities with the special red telephone in his cubicle, should the letters contain certain keywords like "suicide", "kill", or "gun", a not-uncommon occurrence in these attempted correspondences which were often written by desperate people after reaching out to society and praying to God had failed to alleviate their pain and seemingly left them with no better idea than to write to Santa Claus and tell him that what they wanted for Christmas was to not feel so sad anymore, to not be alone anymore, to have just one person in the world who would actually be happy to see them, to not spend every minute of every day imagining what it would be like to shoot themselves in the head, to not be abused anymore, to get free of the addictions that were ruining their lives, or to get the courage to kill themselves, which Laurent would read and, should he determine that the letter contained an active plan for suicide or violent act against other people, then mark it to be forwarded to a special police address while informing the police through the telephone the correspondent's information so that an arrest could be made immediately by a heavily-armed SWAT team that would kick down the person's door and shove him to the ground before handcuffing him and dragging him off to a psychiatric institution for his own safety or the safety of society in general, a system which was after Laurent had spent only eighteen months on the job simplified to an automated process that allowed the letter-readers to immediately alert the police themselves rather than pass the letters to the middleman, Laurent, who, unemployed, ineligible for government unemployment benefits, and stuck in a town that had never quite recovered from the relocation to China of its aircraft manufacturing plants which had once employed tens of thousands, once again struggled to find work, applying countless times to every job available to people with his limited qualifications in the back of the newspaper (behind the editorial section, where politicians gloated that there were plenty of jobs available and anyone who didn't have a job was just too lazy to apply for one), occasionally getting interviews with the hiring manager, usually group interviews in which he competed with a dozen or so babbling inbred freaks who would mostly be directed to another room after the interview while Laurent and the other losers would be shown out and thanked and told that they would be contacted with a decision soon, which invariably meant that they hadn't gotten the job, that Laurent had somehow in some way he couldn't figure out performed worse in the interview than the barely-functional subnormals who gibbered pathetically at each inane question posed by the beady-eyed hiring managers at the front of the room checking off items on their clipboards and telling everyone that they only wanted the "best of the best" at their stores, employees with the same loyalty to the company felt by these hiring managers, who represented a certain personality type that, when granted even a hilariously small amount of power, is immediately overwhelmed by utterly worshipful loyalty to their employer, total identification with whatever role they have been assigned to play in the company or government that has hired them, personalities found to flourish under organizations that valued loyalty yet lacked the strong leadership necessary to avoid the ascendance of yes-men and cringing toadies to positions of power, where they would capitalize on their own total lack of charisma and individuality by transforming themselves into the mindless tools of their masters, and thereby weaken the entire structure, a series of interruptions, not human beings, one empty space after another, the "infections of the machine", as the minor left-wing academic Marcel X called them in his book on the relationship between twins and totalitarianism, _Amnesia and Teleosimulationism: the Metonymic Rupture of Essentialist Anxiety in Transformational-Generative Binarism_, in which he pointed out that most of the major dictators throughout modern history have each had a twin who, if they did not wither and die as a "vanishing twin" but were successfully born, then, in contrast to their ambitious brothers, invariably shunned the pursuit of power in favor of a simple life of gardening, animal husbandry, or the arts, such as twentieth century German chancellor Adolf Hitler's twin brother Balthasar, a skilled painter of portraits, separated at birth from his brother by a clerical mistake that was not uncovered for over a century and, after making a name for himself in Vienna, was sent to India in 1943 with a diplomatic expedition to paint a colossal mural in Bombay glorifying the Nazi project by displaying figures of European Nazis and Indians hand-in-hand atop the corpses of their enemies, though the meek Balthasar never got around to painting the mural and spent most of the expedition hiding in his hotel room from the imposing Nazi delegates who, fortunately, ignored him, considering his mission to be irrelevant in comparison to their own attempts to win the Indians over through more straightforward means, their quest to directly establish an alliance with the anti-British guerrilla armies currently fighting all over the country (that would of course be broken once Germany's other enemies had been defeated), in coordination with the ineffectual Nazi liaison to these groups already in place for three years at that point, Angeliko Strauss, an Austrian, described in the book as a harsh man in a black trench coat with the silhouette of an ostrich on the back, as the ostrich was during those years the symbol of his country, which in English is called Austria but in German is called Osterreich, a name from which the English word _ostrich_ is derived (as the ancient Greeks believed the ostrich was native to the region that later became Austria), and who, exiled to India due to, this book claimed, unproven suspicions that proof of his Aryan lineage had been faked, had immediately set about failing to recruit the natives to the Nazi cause by parading through local villages his daughter, who he had renamed Lakshmi, a four-armed girl whose extra pair of arms were all that had survived of a parasitic twin that had merged with her body some time before birth, a proud and impatient girl who even before her eleventh birthday often clashed with her father, ridiculing his inane sloganeering, undermining his attempts to convince the crowds of weary villagers that she was an incarnation of the Hindu goddess of fertility and prosperity that was her namesake by swearing fiercely at them in her lisping Hindi and making rude gestures with all four hands behind her father's back as he bellowed out speeches on the kinship between the Indians and the Aryans of Europe, one single family that had been separated for thousands of years but had at last found an opportunity to reunite and triumph over the lesser races, a statement the Indians found confusing, not only due to the obvious racial differences between the barking visitor and themselves, but also due, in fact primarily, to Strauss's total ignorance of their language, as he spoke only German and refused to stain his tongue with the words of barbarians, and only allowed his daughter's nursemaids to teach her the local language because, firstly, he had made up his mind to use her in any way necessary to bring the natives into an alliance with Germany against the British (thereby demonstrating his usefulness to his superiors in the Party back home and possibly allowing him to return home) and would need her to speak directly to them if they were to accept her supernatural origins as a representative of their celestial pantheon, and secondly, because he viewed the girl as a loathsome mutant, a subnormal worthy only of exploitation and destined, once her role in her father's scheme had been fulfilled, to be sacrificed to the purity of the Aryan race, which would soon be free of all the half-wits, defectives, perverts, and idlers who had infested Europe and undermined its glory, all the disgusting, freakish organisms that dared to impugn the genetic harmony of their parents, all the vicious little monsters like this girl, a mere infection of her mother's uterus, more like the sooterkin of Dutchwomen than a human child, an abject beast that all sane people could instantly recognize as a hideous abomination, and which Strauss recognized as what was almost certainly the spawn of a union between his wife and some other man, since his own genetic purity, despite what certain of his rivals in Austria claimed, was above suspicion, leaving him with no choice but to strangle his wife in a jealous rage as she lay sweating and feeble on the soiled blankets where she had given birth moments earlier, then to report to the authorities that she had died naturally in childbirth, a lie that he himself sometimes took for the truth, filling him with hatred for this girl, who, he imagined, had killed her mother as the first among many acts of evil she would no doubt inflict upon the world, and deserved to be cut up and fed to the wild dogs swarming at his feet, Strauss thought as he made his daily speech to the crowds passing in and out of the market on a streetcorner near their hotel in Bombay one morning in summer 1944, the last time Lakshmi ever saw her father, when, patriotically screaming Nazi slogans at a group of disinterested old women who declined to inspect her extra pair of arms, he was suddenly swept from his perch atop a wooden crate by a pair of foreign-looking men and pulled into the endless glut of people crushing their way through the dusty city, never to be seen again, even after the Nazi delegation contacted a number of their agents undercover among the British with inquiries regarding their colleague, not because they were particularly concerned about Strauss himself, but because they thought that the rest of them might be targeted next, assassinated and thrown in a river or buried in a forest, to which their agents replied that they had heard nothing about Strauss, and conjectured that he had been killed during a kidnapping of his daughter by Hindu extremists eager to take this monster back to one of their temples high in the mountains where she would no doubt be ritually defiled by dozens or perhaps even hundreds of beturbaned worshipers in scenes of barbaric debauchery so repugnant that these agents hesitated "even to hint at the thousand and one humiliations to which she would no doubt be subjected that these savages might by these acts grow closer to their disgusting goddess", though, unbeknownst to them, Lakshmi had not in fact been kidnapped (and it is unclear why they so confidently assumed this), but, wandering the streets of Bombay alone, shivering at the sight of the mountainous blue monsoon clouds inexorably rising over the low skyline, took refuge in a damp, sagging warehouse on the harbor where the East India Company had, a century earlier, stored the immense quantities of saltpetre carried all the way from Jhansi in north-central India to be taken back to Britain where, it was hoped, this famous anaphrodisiac could be used to limit the crisis developing in Merthyr Tydfil, which had for several years been quarantined under penalty of summary execution by the army due to recurring outbreaks of "the solitary vice" that had reportedly been introduced there by an "African wizard" in 1830 and had six years later at last grown so prevalent among the citizenry that crops were going untended, the great furnaces and factories had gone silent, and nearly three-quarters of the town had reportedly starved to death in their monomaniacal fixation on pleasuring themselves night and day without even a moment's rest, despite the best efforts of a team of doctors to keep their patients nourished with a saltpetre-infused broth as the doctors themselves sucked on saltpetre lozenges that, tragically, were not enough to preserve several of the younger ones from immediately falling into the same madness that they were attempting to treat, and, indeed, by the time an elderly French doctor in whom the physical decrepitude of age had rendered him immune to this threat arrived to advise his English and Welsh counterparts, nearly all of them had begun to fall into the grip of this feverish insanity, leaving this French doctor to work essentially alone to prevent _the Vice_ from killing everyone in Merthyr Tydfil or, at least, from spreading to the rest of Europe, where reports on what exactly was happening there were totally forbidden, to keep others from learning about this deadly form of pleasure and trying it themselves, a fear which, the doctor discovered, was largely unfounded, as the compulsion at work in Merthyr Tydfil was not due merely to the realization that such self-abuse was possible (though, he remarked, it would indeed be remarkable if anyone continued to risk pregnancy and disease through physical intercourse once the easy alternative of intracourse had been made known to the world), but originated instead from the "influencing scent", or what was later discovered to be pheromones, of a dodo, a particularly foul example of this most loathsome variety of all birds which, thought to have been driven into extinction by a team of brave explorers centuries earlier, had in fact survived in large numbers on a small island in the Indian Ocean visited by an Italian who, made a eunuch in his childhood to serve in Pope Celibate XVIII's personal choir, was able to visit the island without falling prey to the dodo's pheromones, and brought back a specimen as a pet to Merthyr Tydfil where in 1830 he settled in search of work at one of the town's ironworks known for hiring singers to regale its workers with beautifully-sung threats of beatings and whippings should their productivity fall as they shoveled and reached and winced over the ash and flame that smoldered and growled beneath the cavernous darkness of the big room designed to have excellent acoustics that would direct clearly to the workers these songs which had been written by some of the most skilled songwriters of the day to be "so 'catching' to the ear of each furnace-man that his thoughts must involuntarily recall to him along with the melody the words of imprecation so bestowed by the _chanteur du fourneau_ even after his customary sixteen hours at his work had been completed and he had returned home to the bosom of his wife, whose every heart-beat would seem the percussion of a timpanum keeping the time for the furnace-songs in his head, and to his children, whose ceaseless mewlings and babblings would but accompany the music like clarinets in the shadow of a bassoon", as one account put it in 1850, later quoted at length by Marcel X in his 1995 book, _Kaleidocratic Othering: the Binaristic Schizophrenism of Hegephonic Reconsumption During the Merthyr Rising of 1831_ (Cornell University Press, pp. 204-205), in which he turned his eye on the "pathological function of transhistorical protocols", in contrast to his early works, which had largely focused on now-outdated post-Marxist and proto-feminanarchist deconstructions of popular culture, such as his study comparing the imperialism of the declining Western Roman Empire in the fifth century to the "Hollywood-Industrial Complex's ongoing project of cultural genocide", _Rome Alone 2: Lost in Europe_, or his study of how popular music in the 1980s was shaped by the Cold War, _Dialectical Material Girl: On the Post-Conceptual Biosemiotics of Zeitgestaltic Phallocolonialism_, or his self-described "transitional" work, a study of the "multigeneric problematization of textual sublimation and collusion" in the arts from ancient times to the then-present day, _From Homer to Homer Simpson: An Intertemporal Framework for Exploring Coextensive Signifiers of Negotiated Expropriation-Constructs in Paralogistic Masculinist Culture-Functions_, though he maintained throughout his career an interest in unpacking the phallocratic Aristotelian-Newtonian privileging of motion over transformation, the patriarchal obsession with the observable physical world over what Marcel termed the _Zeitgestalt_, the ultimate prosthesis of an infinitely eroticized singularity eternally seeking to re-enact that most archetypal of all stories, found everywhere in human society from ancient cave paintings in France to Babylonian stone carvings to contemporary romance novels, the story Joseph Campbell called the _Deflowering of the Maiden_, wherein this singularity, the expression of that doubled abjection (that infinite hall of mirrors) toward the totality of interpretation between object and subject, which is itself a "lens of abjectification" (as it constitutes always the recognition of the chaotic or arbitrary elements assembled coincidentally and without any meaning in themselves into a single object of a purpose potentially unrelated to the individual elements), manifested as a primal anti-chaotic force known in Marcel's writings as the Hyperphallus, which Laurent, reading about this concept in _Amnesia and Teleosimulationism: the Metonymic Rupture of Essentialist Anxiety in Transformational-Generative Binarism_ one day at a little table by the window in the public library downtown, found utterly baffling, and, deciding that this book, which despite being inexplicably shelved with the library's books on conjoined twins and Marcel's own claims that it covered that topic, was no more than gibberish, angrily shoved it in a garbage receptacle on his way out, where it sat until, at the end of the day, the one of the library's volunteers assigned to pick out the discarded books from the garbage found it and sprayed it with an antibacterial solution before returning it to the shelves (dozens of books are discarded this way every day in the average city library, which is why they so often smell awful, and why some libraries no longer have garbage receptacles in the parts of the building open to the public) to wait a few more months until Marcel returned as he always did to check out his own books, which would ensure that they would not be thrown out for disuse (any book not checked out for three years would be thrown out according to the library's rules), a fate that worried him and inspired him to suggest to his acquaintances that they borrow these books from the library if they were interested whenever the topic of his career came up (well aware that few were likely to actually buy these books, which, due to their rarity and the policies of Cornell University Press, cost over two hundred dollars each), much as he had when talking to Laurent one night at the government facility where, seeking to perhaps come into contact with useful examples of the working class who might contribute something worthwhile to the ongoing studies of the declining United States for which he had regrettably banished himself to this Midwestern void (a fascinatingly dull Petri dish of post-industrial malaise) for a full five-year investigation in 1994, Marcel served as lead manager, wandering with bleary eyes behind the fluorescent glare of his spectacles among the endless grid of cubicles and stopping here and there to watch employees like Laurent typing messages into internet bulletin boards and Usenet whenever the central supercomputer detected talk of violent revolution and routed one of these hundreds of workers to anonymously respond with combinations of stock phrases like "violence has never solved anything" and "that would make us as bad as the people we oppose" and "you have to vote for the lesser of two evils" with very reasonable-sounding appeals to remember pacifists like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Junior, who solved the problems facing their peoples without resorting to violence and ought to serve as the models for anyone seeking to protest the United States government's actions or those of governments allied to it, an idea Marcel, despite the discomfort he felt in working with the repressive, xenophobic, neo-colonialist United States government, supported without reservation, aware that he, as a cisracial superaltern white male, had an obligation to use his extraordinary privilege in a responsible manner, and, through this job, would be helping to, if not undo the millennia of damage his ancestors had inflicted upon the subalterns of the world, at least confront that legacy with a peaceful, supernumerary disjunction of post-hegemonic intereffectuated modalities and autonomized hybridities, which he now attempted to further bio-instrumentalize by chatting with Laurent as they walked together down the long aisles between cubical walls that echoed with the rainlike sound of a thousand keyboards in operation and the intercommed blasts of shrill old women from the control room berating people for falling behind or switching to the wrong chatroom, down to the breakroom, to the coffee vending machine where Laurent waited patiently for the little paper cup to drop down onto the platform and the nozzle to begin spraying the coffee as Marcel, this cringing, sweating little man, combed with his fingers his sparse gray hair and babbled about the disproportionate number of "diasporic Africans" incarcerated in United States prisons and how difficult life must be for Laurent, constantly attacked by police everywhere he went, arrested on spurious charges, denied his sense of humanity, oppressed by the white male hegemony, then, Marcel, after stammering something about how his "postgraduate studies of, and lifelong admiration for, the Black Panthers" had led him to renounce his "slaveowner" name for his current name, suddenly noticed the book on conjoined twins Laurent was holding and recommended his own book on the subject, which, though he had since come to reject much of its premises for their irretrievably phallo-deterministic approach to human behavior, still might hold a certain usefulness for those seeking to explore the systemic operationalization of counter-individuating polysynthetic biologies such as conjoined twins and similar transperipheral disruptions, a recommendation Laurent took politely, starting to thank him for his interest, before Marcel abruptly cut him off and announced that Laurent's five minute break was over and that he should get back to work immediately, cold, dismissive, in an effort to avoid microcolonizing Laurent's racial struggle with a too-friendly approach that might undermine his autonomy and allow Marcel to fall into the "white savior" trap that is, if anything, far more racist than even the lynchings of the Ku Klux Klan or the brutality of the police who make it impossible for Laurent to so much as walk down the street without being assaulted and incarcerated, to say hello to white womyn without being horrifically beaten to death, or to buy a house in a white neighborhood without a cross immediately being burned in his front yard, the thought of which briefly made Marcel worry that night for Laurent's safety as the two, their shift ending at the same time, walked out into the hot summer night and crossed the parking lot to their cars, which were parked near each other, allowing Marcel, as Laurent fumbled with the keys to his old Honda, a chance to casually propose his idea for a pornographic film that would be both feminanarchist-friendly and counter-systemically devoid of the "male gaze" and star Laurent, who Marcel knew from his scholarly investigations into pornography to have been an actor in such films, as an archetypal (yet entirely free of any very much wrongheaded apparitions of racially exclusionary paramasculinist authenticisms of subsumption and concretizing heteronormativities) subaltern who, in his congress with a white female actor to be cast later, transgresses the dominant patriarchal denotative-connotative sublimation of oppositional metonymy and reveals to the audience (if referring to the many individual viewers of this work as an _audience_ is not overly problematic in its appropriative homogenification) a socio-abstractive and post-disintermediationist account, if not method, of disentangling the prurient atrophy-machines of phallicized asymmetric "parataxiomatic" supersession inherent to the pornographic culture of the racist, misogynistic West, beginning with, should he choose to accept this role, Laurent's naked body on display on a morgue's operating table, viewed from above, the _without-body _of transformational-generative delimitation, murdered by racist (if it is not too redundant to say so) police as a natural expression of the violent bigotry against persons of color inherent to all whites, his body inspected by the female coroner (the only other character in the film), who Laurent, his mind wandering in that instant from Marcel's nonsense about their bodies merging into a "post-transracial yet biunivocal celebration of difference", pictured as his old friend Bella, dead then almost five years, who the last time he saw her had seemed so much older than she had when filming their last movie together just weeks before her death, and looked afraid and alone, worn-down, on the verge of tears, walking with him out of the liquor store where Laurent had by coincidence found her staring vacantly at a display case of wine when he went there to buy something for the night and back toward his apartment with a hand against his arm to steady herself as she talked about how much she missed him and how she was thinking of moving to California to look for work, pointing as she said it toward the last glow of the sun over the strip mall at the western end of the deserted parking lot where they walked beneath the buzzing white lights high above that made this vast stretch of asphalt look like the surface of the moon in the long night looming starless above with only the distant whistle of freight trains way off across the city and the occasional passing car to remind them that there was any life left in the world, that this was not some post-nuclear Eden of dead stone and fast-food restaurants encircled by walls of "Asian massage" parlors and tanning salons and paycheck-advance emporiums, their neon reading _closed_ and washing them in all different colors as they shuffled by, toward Laurent's apartment complex hidden somewhere behind all this, deep in this labyrinth of parking lots, past the old YMCA that had been abandoned over a decade before and had begun to crack and sink among the forest of weeds growing up from the pavement around it where nature was leaking in from the backyards of an adjacent housing development from which a couple of homely teenage girls climbed and sat watching them on the prefabricated brick wall that divided their neighborhood from this lunar zone and that gently echoed back the sound of Bella's voice telling Laurent she was thinking of taking one of the Xs out of Foxxxy to make it less clichéd, though Laurent thought it would make her name seem like some weird tribute to comedian Redd Foxx, and wanted to tell her she should take two Xs out and try to get a normal job, but didn't say it, couldn't, because he knew that someone like Bella could never survive a normal life, that it was too late, that being choked and whipped by sleazes in "granny" videos was probably all she was qualified to do anymore, was her best hope of staving off the homelessness and prostitution and arrests and suicide that he imagined he could see in her eyes, that he pictured as a sudden landslide of tragedies waiting poised above them up there in the black sky, waiting for her to make one wrong move, to trust the wrong person, to write one bad check, to run out of money because some guy refused to pay her the money she had already promised to a landlord or drug dealer, and end up murdered, though in reality her death was less dramatic than that, less understandable, and now, reaching into the inner pocket of his coat, he felt the picture of himself and Bella from a mall photobooth, reminding him of her, while, mirroring the gloom of his thoughts, it began raining harder than ever in the lonely courtyard of the apartment complex, on the rooftop of the little gazebo, on the rattling umbrella over Laurent, who, walking out to the downwardly-sloping incline covered in dead grass and cigarette filters behind one of the buildings, could smell the autumn in the air, shrugging down into his coat as the first hints of twilight further darkened the cloudy sky over a broad vista of office parks and upscale strip malls glowing through the curtains of rain, cars hissing through the wet streets in sudden bursts that gave way again to stillness, revolving fast food signs pulsing like warning beacons or Christmas lights among the bits of garbage impaled on the defoliated spears of the trees where birds sat drenched and motionless waiting for the rain to end, not even cocking their heads to watch him as he took shelter from the view of passing cars behind the gray trees and pulled out the sandwich bag of Minimus herbs which he rolled into cigarette paper and lit, feeling the effect right away, feeling lighter, warmer, safer, and, imagining Bella there beside him, the herbs worked exactly as advertised, making it seem as if his imagined conversation with her was real, or at least allowing him to forget for several minutes at a time that it wasn't real, as he made a clever remark about the cold weather and Bella, looking out through the trees at the shining streets with him, laughed and made a clever remark of her own, which, under normal circumstances, he would be fully aware of thinking up himself, but currently seemed to come from Bella, who, though Laurent was half-aware that he couldn't actually see her frail body there at his side, at the same time seemed tangible, shivering in the cold rain and telling Laurent how happy she was to see him, her bright blue eyes watching him as he told her about his mission, as she huddled against him under his umbrella, as she breathed the watery air and felt a sleepy tranquility settle over the world, over the emptying parking lots stretching into the distance, over the sparkling puddles collecting at the bottom of the hill, over the stranger in a raincoat walking a rigid dog down the sidewalk below, down from the newer housing complexes and toward the city lighting up the sky way off to the south, filling the horizon with a fiery orange glow that increased as the sun set and the world's shadow rose from the ground, surrounded them, hid them, alone together beneath the dead trees, beneath the eaves that dripped heavy drops that burst on their umbrella when they walked back into the courtyard and waited there behind the shabby lattice of the gazebo, watching the warm glow of the windows around them and waiting for morning, Laurent half-asleep where he stood, Bella (Laurent somehow knew) pondering his mention of his old boss, Marcel X, who had, through a late-night telephone call, again proposed making a film with him, and had, seemingly by coincidence, led the support group for "transweight" women Bella for several months before her death had attended on the suggestion of one of her directors after admitting that, despite her weight of ninety-two pounds at five feet and eight inches tall, she saw herself as morbidly obese, which Marcel, as part of his field research into a new hermeneutics of phallogentrification and the euro-patriarchal psychogenesis of asymmetric non-dichotomous exclusion narratives in post-transient social schematicism, encouraged her to accept each week in his office downtown with twelve other skeletal women who would share stories about how their families had rejected their status as transweight and encouraged them to eat more, or how a husband had "gaslighted" them by claiming that their self-perception as obese was evidence of a mental illness, or how a clerk had laughed at them and called them skinny at a shop when buying extra-extra large clothing, which Marcel, recalling his own research back home at Cornell University, compared to the ill treatment of numerous obese and transweight figures throughout history and herstory, from psychiatric patient Ellen West, who was persecuted in the early twentieth century by unsympathetic doctors like Ludwig Binswanger, to celebrities like Pope Celibate XVIII, who was, in his biography, Marcel said, cruelly mocked for his size, described in hideous weightphobic terms (much as these women gathered here had been) in this book, the only biography that had ever been written on this particular pope, likely because of his weight, and which even went so far as to attack him with racist and homophobic assertions (often corollaries to weightphobia), which Marcel quoted to them one morning, reading directly from the moldy old tome, saying, in the horrified tone he had often adopted while reading from problematic texts to illustrate the wrongheaded origins of premises set forth by the invariably ignorant callers to his short-lived public radio chat show on philosophy and politics entitled _Modus Phone-Ins_, "the new pontiff was a notorious invert from the very heart of the Sotadic zone, known even in his youth amongst his countrymen in the eastern Greek islets to forego the usual unbodicing of wenches and low carousals with milkmaids cherished in the hearts of men of those lands in favor of making of his own body a laboratory of dubieties wherein any of his fellow inverts might practice the Greek Science, caressing the velvetish integument of his brow, exploring the peerless opulence of his embonpoint, and setting forth across his expansive corpus new expeditions into franco-masochistic realms undreamt-of by the Marquis de Sade himself, into opium-clouded afternoons in a Venetian rooftop garden where one hundred angelic castrati would sing hymns based on the poetry of Catullus as the Pope attempted to impregnate a stable of bulls which, he believed, would, if successfully impregnated, each give birth to a son of unmatched vigor, though, their anatomy failing to comply with his dream, none of these bulls ever gave him issue, and after carefully examining the bulls in their rooftop stalls each morning at dawn he would exclaim with rage and order the castrati to finish their ablutions and come forth from their adjacent apartment, a sort of _kafes_ the Pope kept locked and guarded by the five strongest men of Italy to ensure that his beloved private choir would not escape, would not flee into the night at the first opportunity, would not rebel against the harsh punishments of the so-called Chief Sumptuary, a disgraced priest chosen to train the castrati after Pope Celibate XVIII heard him singing an intricate melody by which the gigolos of one of the brothels frequented by this Pope would, in this time before the accurate chronometry of Mr. Harrison had reached Venice, measure how long to continue each of their assignations, a practice which would inspire a Welch man of capital visiting this brothel to begin the famous practice of furnace-singing in his ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil, where, as late as 1858, the locals were so greatly afraid of the form of _amour de soi_ commonly known now as _the Welch Vice_ infamous for nearly destroying their town twenty-two years earlier that the populace, nearly all of whom still took massive amounts of saltpetre with each meal to suppress their self-reflexive desires, rioted when the Sepoy Mutiny in India cut off all trade of saltpetre to Britain at the command of Lakshmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi and the most beautiful woman in all India", whose history one of the ancient Untouchables living in the abandoned quarter of the harbor in Bombay taught to Lakshmi Strauss in 1944 as they sheltered from the torrential monsoon, believing that the two, in sharing a name, were mysteriously linked, and that Lakshmi Strauss's extra set of arms were perhaps loaned to her by her revolutionary predecessor to carry out some unknown act that would somehow free India from British rule, which Lakshmi supposed could only be a good thing, if it hurt the ratlike British, who were as they spoke encroaching on the homeland she had never seen but had always imagined as an idyllic land, a country of cool forests, glimmering streams, and golden meadows the British were intent on destroying, according to an Axis-supporting newspaper she had glimpsed one day while out scrounging around the docks for food, awakening a patriotism she had up until then dismissed as the foolishness of adults, the stuffy old men her father would meet in their house for _coffee_, an English corruption of _café_, a beverage named for the type of shop that serves it, which is itself named for (and originally designed to resemble) the _kafes_ of the Ottomans which inspired the design of the rooftop apartment of Pope Celibate XVIII's personal choir, who after howling into the ashen dawn an openly perverse and idolatrous song welcoming the sun into the sky would accompany the Pope down onto the creaking and sagging walkways of Venice (this was nearly a century before they would be replaced by the modern walkways of Alexander Side) linking the flooded mansions where he would bang with his papal scepter on every door he passed, cry "wake up, wake up, you slumbering poltroons, lest I raise a further hooroosh upon your heads, for your bread is rising and your tea is pouring, and the enemy is well-fed upon his battlements", and order his castrati to sing as loudly as possible to wake the Venetian people and encourage them to do their duty in maintaining the city even under the occupation of the Austrians, to whom Napoleon had given the city two years earlier, and who, as good Catholics, tolerated the bloated Pope's activities while he remained in exile from French-controlled Rome, despite his reputation as the most corrupt Pope since the Renaissance, since murder and debauchery was an open and accepted practice among the Papacy, since Pope Celibate XVII was killed by one of his mistresses, a shaved silverback gorilla named Lucrezia, after Lucrezia Borgia, the most beautiful woman of Europe and the daughter of one of that Pope's rivals, Pope Alexander VI, who Celibate XVII had poisoned in order to take his place on the throne, which he held for less than a day before being killed himself, the shortest reign of any pope, even shorter than that of Pope Celibate XVIII, who by March of 1800 had raised an army of enemies among the sleep-deprived citizenry of Venice, infuriated by the Pope's dawn wake-up calls he performed before going to bed himself, as he invariably stayed awake all night commanding his choir to sing, ringing the bells of Saint Mark's _campanile_ out of boredom, and slingshotting firecrackers at the shuttered windows of houses as he was rowed down the Grand Canal at midnight atop the roof of his hundred-foot-long gondola, often called the "Floating Vatican", which was said to have in its lower holds a fully-equipped bathhouse so full of imported Japanese _kagema_ and Indian _hijra_ that it nearly sank more than once, and was, to protect it from the predations of the Black Gondola Society, equipped, it was said, with massive cannons the Pope, in the last few nights before his death, added to his arsenal of nocturnal mischief, and seemed without fail to shoot off "exactly at the moment you had at last fallen asleep", followed by the sound of the Pope's gleeful cackling echoing down the canals as some statue or belltower exploded under the force of the cannonball launched at it by shirtless boyservants with fingers black from gunpowder (charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate) and backs lined with salted wounds from the Pope's whip, a bejeweled _chat à neuf queues_ stolen from a Parisian _maison close_ by one of the Pope's Indian boys who, the boy admitted one night in Venice, had been trained in France as an astrologist, a revelation that so fascinated the Pope that he immediately dismissed from his chambers the servants turning the crank that powered his rotating bed and, stroking the _hijra_'s hair, asked the boy to predict the glorious future of the Venetian Papacy, which, the Pope declared, staring up through the skylight of the gondola at the wise and ancient stars, would certainly reach glories beyond those of Napoleon himself, and make "Papa Celibe XVIII" a name to be remembered for ten thousand years, though, in reality, he was to be forgotten almost immediately, when, after the astrologer rightly predicted that this Pope would be condemned by the Council and erased from all but the most rigorously digressive history books, Pope Celibate XVIII flew into such a rage that his heart literally exploded in his chest, hurling bloody chunks of flesh all over the silk sheets of his bed and the priceless medieval paintings lining the walls, terrifying the boys of the gondola, who decided, in their panic, to hide the evidence of the Pope's death while they prepared to flee the country, as they feared with good cause that they would be held responsible and charged with his murder, and, with great exertion, managed to heave his enormous body up to the _garde-fou_ of the gondola's upper deck and shove him over, into the murky canal, where his size, according to legend, was such that it raised the water level of Venice by thirty inches and flooded eleven piazzas, and that some, a week later, watching the corpse being lifted out of the water by a complex system of straining and shuddering pulleys designed specifically for this task when fourteen horses were crippled trying to drag him up, joked that they expected him to give birth like Pope Joan I, who Pope Celibate XVIII, unknowingly encouraging the half-serious rumors that he was a woman which had tormented him throughout his reign, had so greatly admired that just before his death he ordered a statue of her in marble, depicted halfway through the act of giving birth at the feet of an astonished-looking horse, to be carved and placed in the courtyard in front of his residence, where she would be venerated as a saint, or would have been venerated, had the statue, a few months after Pope Celibate XVIII died, not been vandalized and made into an object of mockery by a band of dissipated youths who crept into the courtyard one morning and chiseled off the protruding head of the papal infant, leaving only the flinching horse and the reclining woman whose indelicate posture would, for nearly two hundred years, invite coarse wits and tourists to pose between her stone legs for the idle amusement of their friends and as a superstitious or casually occult fertility ritual which surpassed the kissing of Ireland's Blarney Stone as the world's most popular litho-erotic ceremony until the 1930s, when rumors began to circulate that the statue had been cursed by a dwarf shaman from the Isle of Minimus, who, upon witnessing the ritual, found it outrageous and decreed that any who engaged in this act would give his wife only two-headed children (or, in some versions, Siamese twins), a fate which, in his homeland, where such deformations were held to be abominable, traditionally meant death for infants and parents alike at the hands of the midwives prepared for this and furnished with special knives to remove all possibility of irregularity spreading to the rest of the community (by the time this shaman had supposedly cursed the statue, 1860 or 1861, or, by some accounts, 1870, these blades were purely ceremonial and the midwives no longer killed anyone, though bigoted Italian literature still claimed that the dwarfs continued this practice well into the twentieth century), and only snickering boys and tourists from the United States and other distant lands were still occasionally seen to "_polir le trou de la Papesse_", as Madame de Staël called it, until the potential value of the statue as a tourist attraction led to the owners of the property it occupied fencing it off with crude chain-link wire in the 1980s, suppressing rumors of a curse by advertising its charming mystical kitsch on French and German television, and bribing tour guides to bring visitors to the site, where they would be charged ten thousand lire to have their photograph taken atop the hapless female Pope, now usually said to bestow upon them only "luck in love", as fitting this more contraceptive age, rather than the promise of children, but still as popular a destination for infertile Europeans seeking a supernatural remedy as it was for lonely young backpackers and divorcés, and said to be the second most popular tourist attraction in Venice (after the Piazza San Marco) up to what was described as a "terrorist attack" in 1999 by members of a fanatical Japanese cult who hid simple gunpowder-based bombs in the place of film in their cameras, severely damaging Pope Joan and totally obliterating the horse when they flung their cameras and ran out past the shocked crowd, only to be arrested several minutes later with the help of passing gondoliers who saw them board a water taxi and reported them to the authorities, at which time the cultists were taken in for interrogation at police headquarters, where they were held until a translator could be found, and admitted that they had blown up the statue, but claimed that it was "for the good of the entire world", an argument which failed to impress the judges presiding over their case (especially after they refused to provide information on a similar but unsuccessful attempt to blow up a statue in France's Père Lachaise cemetery that same day involving East Asian tourists who escaped after their bombs failed to cause any significant damage), but which led certain paranormal researchers and journalists to speculate, based on notes found in the belongings of the Venetian cell, that the cult had feared a plan to steal the statue of Pope Joan and take it to Paris, where it would undergo some kind of apocalyptic mating ritual at the direction of a group that remained obscure, somehow producing what their diagrams appeared to depict as a human infant made of stone (closely resembling the mythical "lithopedia" once believed to reside in some women's bodies by misogynists and quack doctors), which these researchers and journalists tied to certain prophecies of Nostradamus, especially those involving a "King of Terror", whose appearance on Earth this cult was believed to be dedicated to preventing, not only by these bombings but by driving "loudspeaker trucks" around Tokyo, shouting nationalistic slogans and hymns in praise of their strange rat-god whose image adorned the sides of their trucks and caused Bella, who suffered from a severe phobia of rats, to turn away from the street and hide her eyes as the cultists drove past the apartment building where one evening in 1994 she was waiting for the photographers to show up for the "modeling" job they had contracted after seeing a bootleg of one of her early films she had made in Germany years before, and as she stood there, enduring the stares of passers-by and watching an arrogant robin twitchingly survey his empire from a telephone line overhead, she imagined that she was a streetwalker and that the cars in the street were stopping not for the traffic light but so that their occupants could look her over, then, as they drove on, were deciding to look for someone younger and thinner, leaving her to wait there, leaning against a glowing telephone booth, alone, dressed in a miniskirt and tube top and not the fur coat she wore in reality, hoping she would be able to find enough clients and make enough money to satisfy her imaginary pimp (who would someday strangle her to death for her failure and throw her body into Tokyo bay), feeling worse and worse even though she knew that none of the people in these cars were really thinking she was a prostitute, or had even noticed her, and if they did it was only to mark the unusual sight of a blonde woman in suburban Tokyo, smoking a cigarette beneath the obscene logo of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone company, far from any tourist district, glamorously aloof, an incorruptible enigma in the deepening twilight, impervious to the understanding of the small children who pressed their faces to the windows of passing cars and watched her turn from the motorized traffic and the dull pedestrians, wreathed in smoke, waiting for these two men who now approached her and in broken English identified themselves and asked if there was anything she would like to drink before they got started, if she wanted any of the dozens of imported liquors with which they stocked the bar next to the kitchen of their surprisingly large apartment where Bella, a glass of wine in hand, sat on the couch and waited patiently as one of the men translated into English the other man pretending to be interviewing her for a mainstream film role, then demanding that to secure the role she perform certain favors she in accordance with the script at first claimed to find revolting, then, after an interminable scene of rather pathetic wheedling, grudgingly accepted, such as skewering live frogs with her nine-inch heels, receiving electric shocks, reciting her poetry as the two men ridiculed it for its clichéd imagery, and, finally, performing for the entertainment of the two men with another visitor, an ostensibly two-headed man whose unusual duplication allowed him to perform certain acts not possible for the monocephalous (it was obvious that this was simply a pair of men stuffed into one large trench coat, and critics were suitably outraged that such a blatant fraud would be committed in Japanese pornography) as Bella half-heartedly sobbed and screamed rather unconvincing expressions of disgust that the translator did not bother to interpret for the others, too distracted by the spectacle unfolding before him on the floor of the apartment, by the bumbling pair of youths constantly losing their grip on each other and falling out of the trench coat, forcing everything to stop while the coat was buttoned up again and Bella, bored and annoyed, to move back to the place she had occupied before the mistake and wait for the director-cameraman to signal them to continue, for the two-headed man to resume his bizarre motions, for Bella to resume wailing in feigned terror, shaking and flinching, begging them to stop, to let her go, to call off this hideous monster whose deformity began to distract her with memories of someone else she couldn't quite remember, disturbing her, so that she had to remind herself to keep screaming, while the image of Laurent Da Revin remained just out of reach, the memory of him telling her about his postnatal conjunction one afternoon at breakfast in an empty shopping mall food court obscured by the alcohol and the years, no more than a subterranean melancholy, though, later that night, when she had dressed and left the apartment with her leopard-print purse full of yen, walking to the limousine waiting in the street with its blushing driver and personalized gift basket, she, without realizing the cause of these thoughts, found herself reminiscing about Laurent, remembering that he had, as he said one day beneath the deep blue of the skylights far above them in the echoing and pungent food court of the mall, grown up in an orphanage, where he had briefly become conjoined with another child, about whom Laurent often speculated, often said, confiding in Bella, that he imagined this child, whose name he did not remember, had grown up to be the person Laurent had been meant to become, a thought he shared again, now, in the rain, as they waited beneath his umbrella in the apartment complex courtyard, watching the streetlights blink on over the buildings' rooftops, a line of white lights Laurent imagined that Bella imagined continuing out endlessly into the night, following them in her mind through the rain, out of the city, into the dark countryside, a chain of diamonds glittering in the abyss, connecting her to some distant city, a silver cord that pulled her into the future, into the person she would become, her own pale corpse waiting in the dark, arms outstretched, toward which she rushed in a vision that had come to her once before, one night in the 1980s, when, half-asleep and depressed by an evening of unsuccessful attempts to finish a poem in the noisy and smoky employee sleeping car among six younger girls gossiping and bickering incessantly, while working as a waitress on the Nice-Cannes line for the short-lived Hooters France Railways, a division of the well-known United States restaurant chain Hooters, which had overestimated the potential popularity of a luxury train that served chicken wings and hamburgers on an overnight ride through the Côte d'Azur after the local managers of Hooters France had assured their parent corporation that Europe was ready for a travel experience based primarily on greasy food, girls in short shorts, and a labored English mispronunciation of "Nice-Cannes", Bella left the crowded waitresses' compartment and her six squabbling subordinates, who, despite admiring Bella for what they saw as her glamorous career in pornography, and typically respectful of her orders, never obeyed her calls for silence during their nightly hysterics (which the train's doctor, an inept Swiss gynecologist, attributed to the apocryphal _bassin du chemineau_ or "freighthopper's pelvis" disorder once thought to be common to all women and weak-minded men who traveled regularly by locomotive), and barely seemed to notice her shutting the door on the cacophony and over-bright lights of the women's compartment to wander alone down the corridor, past the dishwashers' compartment where the mostly Spanish dishwashers played cards and swore flamboyantly with their door wide open, past the chef's compartment where the stern Italian chef was already shut away and asleep, to the train guard's compartment where the former Chief of Police of New Orleans, an unassimilated Creole from a prominent family of Louisiana antiques dealers and circus horsemen, could be seen plotting obsessively over his blueprints of the train on which he had scrawled floridly casuistic biographical analyses of each passenger and his judgments regarding their potential danger to the peaceful outcome of their journey, judgments based primarily on nationality, but also race, gender, physiognomy (a practice that continued well into the 1980s among the wealthier Creole families of New Orleans), and, controversially among his superiors at Hooters France, whatever information he would collect from their personal belongings during his inspection of the baggage car, technically a legal inspection, but one that tended to outrage the passengers who detected that their suitcases and hatboxes had been breached, though most accepted the searches as a necessary anti-terrorism measure, if they took their complaints to Hooters France Railways customer service, or as part of the general charm of the experience, if instead they confronted the guard himself while disembarking at the modest platform of the Gare de Cannes, where, scowling at the harsh morning light, he would indignantly claim, in English or his Creole French, that no one had touched their belongings, and that any damage was due to the prying fingers of the so-called Ghost Hobo, a mysterious, skeletal figure in shabby evening dress whose myth had terrified the guard in his youth and even now filled him with a real dread when poking around the deserted corridors and employees-only sections of the train late at night, so that when Bella, her gaunt features thrown into sharp relief by the light of the desk lamp illuminating the blueprints before him, appeared that night in the doorway, he gasped and had reached halfway to his pistol before recognizing that his visitor was not in fact the peripatetic terror of his nightmares, but merely the supervisor of the waitresses known according to French locomotive terminology as _filles du roi_, those braying nymphettes, imported mainly from Florida, who when Bella was called elsewhere and no passengers were nearby derived great amusement from tormenting him with salacious winks and gestures, and who were no doubt presently saying the most vile and lecherous things about him now that their disapproving supervisor was away to visit the guard's compartment and ask him for the key to the roof, where from time to time she enjoyed sitting, late at night, clinging to the iron rings attached to the rooftops of most older French train cars (like those of this line), vestigial relics of a now-forbidden practice whereby the French police would torture certain prisoners by chaining them to the roof of a moving train for a day or more, often driving them insane with bizarre hallucinations brought on by the howling wind that could at times make it difficult to draw breath, though Bella for some reason the guard couldn't fathom seemed to find the roof pleasant enough, feeling, though she knew the guard wouldn't understand and never bothered trying to explain it to him, somehow purified by the wind that now flowed over her as she climbed through the hatch and settled atop the train, scrubbed clean by the cold midnight air, her physical body seeming to transform little by little into vapor that trailed off into oblivion, behind the train hurtling toward the distant immensity of the night, toward the sleeping future, toward the white corpse she saw, this night, standing infinitely far away, the welcoming arms, the face she recognized as her own, which as her living body dissolved in the rushing air and the torrential downpour that broke now from the black sky seemed to grow steadily closer, a vision which, somehow, was not frightening, but a relief, a vision of escape, of a final rest from this weary world, from the universal pain and fear of life, from the cruel insults of the Parisian train conductor, who viewed Bella and her girls as barbarians, and from the lewd shouts of the American tourists which enraged her and were even now wafting up to Bella's ears from one of their open windows, with expressions of disapproval at the mistakes of their favored teams competing in televised sporting events that were broadcast by satellite from the United States to the train, their howls at the sight of one of the waitresses passing their cabins, their outraged barks at the guard whenever he would divine through study of his blueprints that a bachelor party or gang of college boys would be likely to attack one of the waitresses and went to their cabins to personally warn them that he was watching or, catching them in the act of cornering one of the girls, to strike them with the traditional train guard's iron mallet he usually kept holstered on his belt and handcuff the belligerent guests together in the train's jail car, which all European trains have, and which is known as the _panier à salade_ (a pun on the famous _Panthéon des_ _salauds_), or, in Great Britain, as the Black Maria, for its tendency in the days of coal-powered trains to be stained black, as it would be located immediately behind the locomotive out of deference to the wishes of the wealthier passengers in private cars at the back of many trains, who, except for certain pre-war members of the infamous Weighted Gentleman's Leisure Club, who were said to enjoy visiting the jail cars of their trains and poking the prisoners with the sharp ends of their walking sticks to pass their long voyages across Europe more agreeably, tended to find proximity to criminality distasteful, and were often found in their private conversations to admit, when most of these European jail cars were confiscated for another use in the 1930s and 1940s, that they hoped the new practice, which did not survive the war, of throwing criminals from the moving train rather than incarcerating them would endure, caring little for the fate of the discarded malefactors, who were often killed in the fall, though in at least one famous case a man's life was saved when, having been caught stealing a sip of soup from the table of a wealthy politician's wife who had declined to share any food with her half-starved fellow passengers, he was thrown at high speed into a marsh next to the tracks and, while catching his breath and watching the train recede into the distance, everyone still aboard was killed in the massive explosion of a bomb dropped from a tiny speck of silver crossing the sky, a shining star that crossed from east to west and finally set when its English pilot, cheering his own luck at catching a train still in operation in this war zone, drifted into the crosshairs of anti-aircraft artillery and crashed, burning, into the ocean, where, waiting without hope of rescue among the slapping waves and curious sharks, the pilot dreamed of his childhood in India, of the vast northern estate that, only a few years later, would be burned to the ground in the violence of the partition, after British officials decided that the violent rebellions, Hindu-Muslim riots, and ongoing terrorist attacks in India were costing the Empire too much for a continued Indian occupation to be profitable, and, claiming, to save face and to make their withdrawal appear to be the consequence of a moral code and not merely the motivation of profit, that the nonviolent protests of Mohandas Gandhi had inspired their decision, they abandoned India, delighting Lakshmi Becker, née Strauss, who, had her husband Jessiko Becker, a German, not died at the hands of British forces after resisting his arrest when caught photographing a new power plant being constructed near Bombay six months before the end of the war, would have celebrated the evening of August 14, 1947, in her rooftop gazebo with the small community of German expatriates to whom Jessiko had introduced her, rather than alone, sipping a sulfurous local liquor and looking out over the bright buildings sinking one by one into darkness, high above the city in her gazebo, leaning against the railing and almost laughing as, pondering the British withdrawal, she remembered how contemptuous and ignorant of politics she had been as a child, smiling with a certain fondness for the proud little girl, as if she were an old woman recalling distant events, and not a seventeen-year-old who back home would barely be considered an adult, despite risking her life against the British, first developing her husband's clandestine photographs in the cellar darkroom from which their servants, causing a great deal of curious gossip among the scullery maids, were strictly forbidden to enter, then, near the end of the war, converting part of the darkroom to produce microdots, which, with a great efficiency owed to her extra set of hands, she produced to send back to Germany the gathered intelligence of their agents in India through their primary contact, the Swiss-Austrian procuretrix of a local cabaret-brothel that catered exclusively to Europeans and employed primarily Ceylonese girls who were seen feeding their visitors skewered kebabs while smiling rigidly with a look of fascination and terror in their eyes in the greasy darkness of the opium parlor upstairs whenever Lakshmi, beneath a black shawl that helped to disguise her four arms, arrived to deliver another set of microdots to the procuretrix in the latter's office, past the hydraulic hookah and the moveable paper screens painted with cranes and Chinese characters and down the almost entirely lightless hall where strange white faces peered out from paintings at irregular intervals along the walls and where, abruptly and somehow unexpected every time, a bibulous albino henchman would loom up out of nowhere to startle Lakshmi and demand in a loud and slurring voice to inspect her for weapons, which Lakshmi would of course find outrageous and, easily fending off the henchman's pair of groping hands with three of her own, the fourth holding the envelope of microdots above the fray, she would force her way into the procuretrix's office, where the two, dismissing the stymied henchman, would reminisce late into the night about Austria, that country Lakshmi had still never seen but claimed she had visited many times and, having dreamed of it for so long and read so much about it, felt justified in saying so, though she sometimes confused details about a certain street in Vienna or a certain national hero, which the procuretrix, who after Jessiko's death called Lakshmi "madame la veuve à quatre mains" (this inspired Luis Buñuel's film of the same name after he met the procuretrix one humid evening in Mexico City and heard the story of Lakshmi, which the procuretrix, "holding court" at an outdoor café, was telling a group of friends to explain her distaste for freak shows like the one to which they had just invited her), overlooked and attributed to her visitor's youth, or to the natural simple-mindedness common, in the procuretrix's opinion, to all beautiful women, forgetting that, like everyone else, she had upon first encountering Lakshmi seen her as unremarkable, if not homely, and only considered her to be beautiful after she saw the extra pair of arms, which themselves were said to hold a special beauty of their own and to envelop Lakshmi in a luminous aura that inevitably changed people's judgment of her appearance whenever they were revealed, whenever they gestured with infinite delicacy here and there, or slid gracefully down to smooth the folds of her skirts, as they did whenever Lakshmi sat across from the procuretrix and rested her chin in one of her four hands while placing the package of microdots on the desk with another, the extra pair gliding, pale in the dusty gloom of the small office, drawing the eye of the procuretrix, who at their final meeting would have suggested Lakshmi use her deformity to entertain the cabaret-brothel's clients and almost certainly make enough money to live comfortably without her husband had she not perceived how offended Lakshmi would be at the thought and wisely limited herself to expressing the hope that Lakshmi had enough money stashed away to secure passage back to Austria once things settled down, assuming that the war was lost and that there would no longer be any reason to go on gathering information after the Russians and British were done executing their contacts in Europe, since no one could now deny that the war had been a disaster and even the fanatical publishers of the underground pro-German newspaper in Bombay had dismantled their printing press and assumed new identities, scattering across the subcontinent in a desperate flight that Lakshmi viewed with distaste until, returning the night of that final meeting at the cabaret-brothel to her house, she noticed a pair of suspicious figures carefully avoiding looking directly at her in the shadow of one of the marble pillars belonging to the rotunda at the end of the street where certain wealthy locals practiced falconry and where Jessiko had often practiced with his own falcon, Adolf, which Lakshmi had freed after her husband's death and now, the morning after the incident at the rotunda, thinking that the bird might have become domesticated and unable to care for itself in the wild, regretted, searching for it through her binoculars one last time in the rooftop gazebo as her servants bundled up her clothes and prepared what luggage she would be able to take with her on the train to Bhopal, to the miserable hovel out of sight of the authorities in a largely industrial area where she alternately expected to be arrested any moment and to wait for the rest of her life for word from the procuretrix that it was safe to return to Bombay and, from there, to Europe, though in reality she would remain in Bhopal only two years, and settled again in her old home in Bombay as the British left India and the danger of being caught and executed like her husband passed, allowing her to move openly even among the British clusters of Bombay's international contingent, and to start a business to support herself, using the skills she had developed during the war to reproduce for wealthy scholars and universities Sir Richard Francis Burton's 1881 translation of the so-called Codex Librae, a book so long that it could only be published as twelve thick volumes of densely-printed microdots, and had in its original Latin manuscript filled an entire library uncovered at an archaeological site in northern India in the 1860s, where, according to hypotheses of the time which were never entirely refuted but which were increasingly rejected in favor of the idea that the entire Codex was a hoax perpetrated by Burton and his associates, a lost band of Roman soldiers had settled as many as two thousand years earlier, an impossibility which was, according to Marcel X's 1994 study, born of eurocentric phallicisms that insist on the eurochristian teleopredication of dominant Western modalities as the normative locus of a hypercolonized self-authentication (that, one must point out, does violence to the Outside of singularitized supersession while acting as a transformative-correlative correctional narcissism among the agents of colonialism themselves), while in reality, the Codex, with all its blatantly assimilative violations of non-differentiated antiterritorialismic flux, simply put, could only have been the paratactically asymmetric gentrification of an intertemporal and countersynthetic entanglement, and was therefore, indisputably, a hoax, a purposeful deception, by which Francis Burton, a self-confessed Orientalist, sought to bolster his own fame by simultaneously Othering and phallo-integrating the subalterns of Bharat as functions of his imperialist-literary crusade by pretending to have discovered this vast buried library and to have merely "translated" it (expropriated it, stolen it, penetrated it, violated it, destroyed it, like all translations) into English, and not composed it himself, in order to justify the many repugnant caricatures and stereotypes found within this unreadable fiction, which so upset Marcel on first encountering it while seeking to brush up on his basic holiday Hindi one day in the rather English-dominated "India" section of the Cornell University library that he was immediately inspired to write his book denouncing it, and felt a determination to finish the book as quickly as possible in order to, by openly challenging the writings of Francis Burton, ensure that the lies of this imperialist criminal would not go unopposed any longer and that any future scholarship on the Codex Librae would transcend any possibility of taking the Orientalist's vile claims as truth, setting the world at large free to soar without the dead weight of past hegemonies weighing it down, or, at least, with somewhat less dead weight, though this denunciation, sadly, did not reach a wide audience, possibly due to a widespread ignorance of the Codex itself, which, when the thought of that ignorance occurred to Marcel, comforted him in his despair at ever liberating the world from this racist monster, a small component of the larger despair that constantly filled him and set him weeping for the future of the world's subalterns despite the knowledge, reinforced by the sight of Laurent standing out there, free, even at this late hour, of attack from the police or Ku Klux Klan below his apartment in the rain, that the world was slowly reordering itself away from racist ideologies thanks to Marcel and other academics like him who had labored tirelessly to provide a more hospitable theoretical groundwork for discourse on subalterns like Laurent who, as if sensing Marcel's gaze, looked up now toward his window, forcing Marcel to duck back to avoid being seen, nearly toppling the camera which would serve to record what was about to transpire, the sole scene, Marcel had decided, in the pornographic film he was to create this night, a film full of wonder and enlightenment, a film that would refute the hegemonic culture's view of the diasporic African male as an animalistic, violent Other while simultaneously escaping the usual trap of depicting the female performer as an unwilling victim to be defiled, or as a polluted object to be used, by taking the unusual step of rejecting the potentially heteronormative use of any female performer at all, which might have lead filmmakers less educated and progressive than Marcel to conceive of a film involving a male performer as Laurent's partner, falling into another trap, in other words, the trap of phallobinaristic bio-structuralist homonormativity (nor could any other performers on the LGBTINSFPRHQ spectrum fail to problematize Marcel's goals with this film), though Marcel, well-versed in pornogogical instrumentality (he was not, however, aware that Laurent himself had invented the idea) from his own use of food refusal tapes, in which actors with outdated haircuts and slightly garish makeup were portrayed declining food and insisting that they were too "full" to eat another bite, to treat the women in his transweight support group, knew that only a film in which Laurent appeared alone, waiting at the spot in the courtyard below the apartment Marcel had taken during his little safari in this repulsive Midwestern collection of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores, unaware of the exact moment that Marcel would strike, or even that Marcel planned to kill him at all, until the moment that Marcel leapt from the darkness and fired the killing shot, would successfully culminate in a socially canalizable pornographic film free of both the usual offenses of that genre and the potential aspects that would inevitably and appropriately expose Marcel to accusations of a "white savior" complex should he as a white male make any film starring a diasporic African male that did anything but respect the legitimacy of that diasporic African male's struggle against the hegemonic, europhallic American culture based fundamentally, as everyone knows, on the oppression of POCs, a struggle that Marcel would heroically refuse to co-opt and would, instead, support by playing his own part in that struggle, the part of the oppressor, which Marcel as a white male would need to play, if he wished to support the continuance of the struggle without misappropriating it, without authoring it, without crafting some hideous, pornographic _Dances With Wolves_ that would undermine the ultimate existential autonomy of this performer who, wondering again why Marcel had offered to pay him five thousand dollars to stand around all night in the rain, now checked his watch and, realizing that Bella had disappeared, looked up sharply and saw to his surprise a vision of his twin, the boy from the orphanage who had been briefly fused to his side after they both fell ill digging graves in the hot sun all day and were left together in a cool bath for nearly six hours by a distracted nurse all those years ago, now grown up, looking exactly like Laurent himself, aside from the slightly arrogant smile worn by this hallucination that confirmed he had been far more successful in life than had Laurent, sneering with a glance at Laurent's rainsoaked clothing and on the verge of speaking, on the verge of explaining everything or else dismissing Laurent with such infinite loathing that in a sudden burst of thunder and flame they would both mercifully cease to exist, when a shape moved in the rain behind him, a white man walking quickly toward them, who as he approached raised a handgun and shouted a racial slur which jolted Laurent from his reverie in time to flee the madman, already recognizable as Marcel, firing wildly in his direction as Laurent turned and ran, slogging through the flooded grass to the slope down from the apartment complex where Laurent stumbled and slid on the mud, making his way down and racing along the sidewalk toward the city just ahead of Marcel, who came rolling clumsily down behind him, then rose to his feet and continued the chase, squinting at the oncoming headlights of the occasional late-night truck and composing as he pursued Laurent a contemptuous reference to the "pretension" of _Last Year at Marienbad_ that would, once added to the text on 1960s cinema he had begun composing earlier that evening, have the double effect of showing that Marcel (who had, despite the obligations of his weekly transweight group and his associated studies of this cultureless "flyover state" town, continued to write his column for a certain left-leaning politics and culture website, and, as he had nearly reached his deadline without writing a word, could not help but think of it now, though he knew he should be concentrating on his present actions, on this moment of immense compassion and heroism which was, he thought, without being at all egotistical about it, in a very real sense the culmination of all human history, of a near-infinite series of events that somehow had arranged themselves over the millennia to allow this one perfect moment of interracial harmony) was sophisticated enough to know the film and that he was enough of a "regular guy" to dislike it, was sufficiently in touch with the blue-collar world and had not forgotten it, even with the many years of academic work separating him from his own blue-collar days, when he had toiled long hours each afternoon in the library as an undergraduate doing research for a popular historian one hot summer to augment the rather scanty purse afforded him by his parents which rarely covered his vital expenses, especially since that summer he had already spent most of his pocket money for the year on attending a series of rallies in Washington advocating stricter gun control laws which, he reflected, had they been successful, would have made it impossible to buy the gun he now brandished with a feeling of ironic gratitude for his own failure as he slowed and steadied the gun in the direction of Laurent, who had twisted his ankle in sliding down the incline from the apartment complex to the street and was barely hobbling along, aimed his gun at the head of his prey, and pulled the trigger at the very moment Marcel tripped over a gap in the sidewalk and fell forward, firing harmlessly into the trees and slamming his face and bad knee into the concrete, where he lay for a moment then, disoriented, raising his gun, and aware that this would be his last chance to stop Laurent, attempted to fire again at the receding figure, which, possibly due to double vision induced by Marcel's fall, appeared twice, a pair of men, identical, slouching and hunted, loping off into the distance, toward Laurent's vehicle, which he would drive to safety after Marcel picked the wrong figure to shoot, his last bullet passing unimpeded through the ghostly double, who escaped with Laurent, leaving Marcel lying there alone, filled with pain and abject disappointment on the wet sidewalk as the rain washed the smell of gunpowder from the air.

Storiot

United States of America

January 7, 2012 - July 10, 2012


End file.
